A Subpac will definitely help you but it’s not cheap.
also, try the “Bassroom” plugin. You can throw in some reference tracks you like and see/hear the difference.
That’s a good idea. Hard to discuss these things in the abstract.
Here are a few recent mixes I’ve made almost entirely on the Digitakt (they’re actually leftover from @BLKrbbt’s Exquisite Corpse challenge, which was a ton of fun even if it didn’t quite gel).
Both songs use the same looped sine wave for the bass line, which sounds find to me in the DT and then in the mixer (both headphones and via monitors). But in these mixdowns I find it overwhelming—distracting and fatiguing. All the individual tracks in the DT are shelved off using the DT’s newish 2nd filter, which I assume everyone does now, to answer @Tchu’s question about basics.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tfz_OyPe7CNkVoaFGNJ7kclnG-mfniJO?usp=drive_link
Here are two recent AR sketches. I’m still figuring out that machine, and taming its bass output is definitely one of the learning curves…
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o7_np9VK-wMuHeZvO79b6qdT7bHG7Clb?usp=sharing
These are sort of an extreme example because, to @maymind_trax’s point, it’s an early mix; maybe the 4th or 5th iteration.
Based on everyone’s responses, I’m wondering if I just need to raise my low shelves because my phones and my room are hiding a bunch of crud.
And get some decent cans. I think a subwoofer would just overwhelm this space.
Good thing I live near Rose Brand. Time to shop for some heavy curtains.
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Honestly a lot of this is experience. You can make amazing mixes in a decent pair of cans once you are experienced. It’s all about repetition and not constantly switching your monitor setup.
Reality is it just takes a lot of time to train your ears and get good at mixing. But here is a simple cheat code to start getting your ears balanced
Download a free vu meter. Put it on master. Mute everything but your kick. Get the kick peaking at -3 or 0 (your stylistic choice, really). Bring in the bass. Don’t let the meter go over 0 too much.
Now slowly fade everything up one track at a time starting with rest of drums (start with most important ones first.- clap offbeat hat for example) then lead then pads, and balance the mix out. Once balanced, start panning. And that’s it. Master that before anything else.
No gear will help with this. You have to get to the point where you can do this in about any monitoring situation.
I was lucky enough to have some really big time mixers work on records I was on in the past. So I could sit in and ask them questions and they all told me the same thing - master volume and pan. This translates to all genres of music.
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Sennheiser HD600 open backed headphones. Plenty of familiarisation with how well produced music sounds on your existing system. Listen at different volumes. Always design and equalise sounds in the mix. The bass should only come from bass line and bass drum, remove it from everything else, to bring clarity. Reduce the length of bass drums for the same reason. Add distortion and grit to bass sounds to give the impression of bass without swamping the low end spectrum. Do three mixes and note what works best.
In post processing, use a spectrum analyser and dynamic equalisation to tame frequency bands swamping or poking out of the mix.
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I’ve read about another balancing cheat method, which is not bad, albeit noisy.
Set up one track with a pink noise oscillator. Set its level to the desired headroom, eg -12db. Then one by one, fade in each track separately until you can barely hear it vs the noise.
According to the book, this method does not replace proper balancing by ear but it helps you to get close to the final result.
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Thanks. This is pretty close to my mixing practice when I’m mixing discrete instruments like bass, guitar, etc, and I get good results this way on my headphones and monitors—yes, even the K240s give me mixes I’m very happy with.
And I’ve adopted a similar practice I use when I build patterns inside the Digitakt, which sound good in the Digitakt. I learned it on the Reaper forums, which are a treasure trove of mixing advice.
What I’m asking about (maybe I should’ve been clearer in the title) is how to translate mixes that sound good inside the DT (via the mixer or direct), to mixes that sound good in the final mix.
Even when I use the DT as a drum kit alone or for one shots in a song, this boomyness isn’t really an issue, because it’s just 1 element on 2 tracks that I can wrangle with EQ and stuff, and the rest of the mix fills it in. Close enough for rock n roll.
It becomes an issue with songs that are 90% in the DT (or the AR now that I scored one). Because it’s affecting the “whole” mix.
I know using Overbridge would help a ton but I really prefer not to have a big screen while I play music. I don’t have disk space or brain space to track everything on separate channels and keep tabs on all those files.
I made a thread on this exact thing in the dt area a few months back.
What I found was the dt compressor really influences the sound in a good way. So to replicate it in the box I did a similar mix process and tried different compressors out.
Also just having fx on sends can really keep a mix cleaned up and controlled.
So if you are comfortable with the leveling part then you may want to simply replicate the dt routing in the daw.
At first I kept preferring my dt mixes but after a while I was able to surpass them. It took a little while to adjust to hearing the beat in a different context.
A compressor can dramatically affect how a kick sounds in a mix. Massive difference there depending the settings and the compressor itself. So it pays to experiment there. I really like the goodhertz compressor in parallel on the drum bus but that’s just me.
Main thing with the digitakt is you are processing the entire beat in a buss and you want to replicate that itb. And also take note of what the digi compressor is doing to the kick drum.
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I tracked the Analog Rytm with a A&H QuPac, it has a high pass filter on each chanel, for my purpose i got very clean signal from it. But today as Overbridge is a lot more stable, i just track it in Abelton.
Its an excellent live mixer with good FX and routing options. Probably any other digital mixing console would also give that sound. It can stream usb too, but i never tried it with a digitakt, maybe EQ the samples before transferring them.
The Model 12 has a 100Hz, -18dB / Octave low cut switch on every channel. I never really use it unless I’m recording vocals. Maybe I should experiment with it.
I don’t know a thing about frequencies but I always figured 100Hz would scoop out way too much of the low end.
It can be configured on the QuPac, at which frequency it passes, its a really thought out mixer, didnt miss anything on it, more features than i had to use. It can have groups and “group fx”, group EQ, compression etc. It has 5 stereo mix out, i use it as a sub mixer, two groups, these go to my Octatrack Ab//CD
Also a matrix mixer mode, no cable removal needed.
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It just depends on the sound source. There’s really no one size fits all approach for EQing. If there’s a ton of bass information, maybe a high pass at 100hz will be fine. If there’s not, maybe it will be too much bass cut.
I think this is the issue with mixing with just hardware though, you are very limited to what you have in front of you, which is why studios chock full of analog gear often grow and grow. This EQ for this purpose, another for another set of instruments, etc. Whereas if you’re using a DAW, you can have many plugins that don’t take up any additional physical space and can all serve different roles. Most experienced mixers use different EQs and different compressors for set purposes. I don’t think the answer is to get more gear, necessarily, but I would try to connect your Tascam to a computer and see if you might get better results mixing in a DAW. It’s also much easier to save and make iterations of a mix, for better or worse.
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Yeah if someone could just put all of Reaper’s bread & butter plug-ins into a 1010 style box I’d be in heaven. I use reaEQ a ton but I just wish it had real knobs and sliders. Not a fan of trackpads and mice.
Maybe what I actually need is a control surface, but those are way pricier than some decent headphones.
EDIT: I’m not that worried about my outboard needs growing and growing because my instrument set, all told, is pretty limited and already defined.
I think a lot of people may be reading this and thinking, “Jeez, this guy’s doing everything he can to avoid that DAW when it will solve all of his problems in a heartbeat.” And they’re right.
But it’s just not as much fun mixing in a DAW, and I’m doing this more than anything else because, well, it’s fun. There’s something I find very emotionally satisfying about turning a knob and hearing a sound change. Doubly so if I can find and turn that knob without ever having to use my eyes.
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Maybe score a 2nd hand Qu/Digital Console, if you need faders, i use an android tablet with mine. (less space consumed), its midi mapable with Bomes translator thou. But i went ITB to get stuff done.(I export to Octatrack, and mix it with live input.)
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If you match levels with a reference track, if your track is bass heavy the rest of the track shall sound quieter in comparison as the bass is using all the mix energy.
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It’s been mentioned already: mix against reference tracks. I think that will solve your issues. That will take your environment a bit out of the equation. If it sounds good on your gear, that doesn’t mean the mix is “right”.
If you don’t like that sound maybe change your listening gear. But you should get used to the new sound after a while
Makes total sense to me. To me, DAWs feel like work. Maybe because I work on computers 60-70 hours a week, and when I’m making music it’s for fun. If I had to mix professionally, no doubt a DAW would be my choice, perhaps even a hybrid situation, maybe using a Cranborne R8 where I could use 500 series modules as inserts in the DAW.
I think your idea about a control surface makes sense too. It might make your DAW experience more enjoyable
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I think a lot of modern mixes that I hear are a little bit too bassy. Perhaps partly due to a lot of people mixing stuff on speakers or headphones that don’t represent the sub frequencies so well, and maybe because people want things to sound good on most listeners’ less capable gear so they compensate. Also I wonder if there might be a bit of a loudness war analogue going on but with heavy basslines.
A lot of recently produced jungle is a good example of this, amazing music but the bass would only need to come down around -3dB and the whole mix would sit better without losing that much bass impact.
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Last year I decided to make a concerted effort to work on understanding how to balance a mix properly. I don’t have the right living situation to support monitors and treatment, so I decided to work hard at using the headphones I have (dt990).
I was going to go the sonarworks route but there’s a wonderful sub Reddit called r/oratory1990 that has most every headphone I’ve ever heard of, with detailed frequency responses and eq settings to flatten them out to a harman curve. The 990’s are very shouty in the upper mids.
Secondly I invested in a good crossfeed plug in (can opener) to give a sense of depth and space to the soundstage since headphones always have the unavoidable problem of making everything sound like it’s coming from inside your head.
Third, I bit the bullet and got rogue amoeba’s soundsource app because I was tired of my eq correction and crossfeed being only in ableton and constantly needing to turn it off if I wanted to render anything. As a very big plus, all of my system audio now gets routed through the same set of filters which makes any sort of referencing an absolute breeze.
Lastly I added a vu meter and frequency analyzer to the monitoring chain in soundsource before the correction so I could look at the levels and balancing of other people’s work in relation to mine. My frequency analyzer is set to a 3db/octave slope (which I believe is the same as pink noise, but please correct me if I’m wrong) and the vu meter is set to the k-14 setting. The vu meter shows both rms and ppm so I can monitor my crest values to make sure my mix is neither squashed or too dynamic. Between the eq and crossfeed the overall volume is lowered quite a bit so I usually add enough gain to the vu meter to keep the needle sitting at 0 db while I’m referencing and mixing then reset the gain back to default when I’m ready to export. I make pretty bass heavy music for the most part so everything is gain staged in relation to the kick and bass when I’m getting my rough levels set.
With all of this I am able to train my ear to listen through the same lens and at the same average volume no matter what I’m listening to ( which has also further reinforced my hatred for advertisements on YouTube and tv).
The things I feel like I’m still missing are a way to actually measure how loud something is coming out of the headphones (in the way one would use an spl meter for speakers, I’m very paranoid about monitor creep and my hearing), and headphones can easily lead me to over analyze things that would never be heard on most systems ( pops, clicks, slight distortions, and most importantly, I have yet to find a system by which I should be adding reverb to a track. The best remedy I’ve found thus far is to set the reverb where it sounds natural then dial it back 5-10%).
All this being said, my entire studio can fit in my backpack, I like being able to take my music with me anywhere I go. I will eventually upgrade my monitoring chain to Rme and Audeze, but for now, the motu m2 and the dt990’s suit me just fine.
So in response to the original question here, the above is what I’ve come to use. It’s the best I know how to do it for now, but I’m always looking to further refine the process and am open to critique as I wouldn’t want anyone here to take my word as bible truth. It’s a constant progression towards happiness, fluency in our craft, and the ability to share our experiences with others that we’re all after… after all.
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I think so, too. I also think a lot of modern consumer gear is garishly bass heavy.
My new macbook is like cartoonishly bass heavy. It makes every podcast sound like a Chris Nolan movie. My Bose headphones are nice but also overdo it on the bass.
Many of my “problem” mixes sound just fine on the stereo in my living room. I suspect it’s because most off my HiFi is inherited and almost as old as I am. But I have to mix for the most common listening situations, which are dogshit soundbars and overhyped headphones for the most part.